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Solaris Machines Have Different Home Paths?

On a couple of Solaris machines, I have noticed that the home path looks a bit different. For instance, on mine I have /home/<userid>; another user has /export/home/<userid>. Is there any real difference between the two paths? Why would these be different?

If one wants that (NFS-mounted home) to be the set-up on a standard
Solaris installation, it takes some doing. The usual installation
configuration does treat /export/home as a local home directory area,
initially. The default auto_home and auto_master files will typically
automount /home from the local copy, enforcing permissions that make it
difficult to alter home directories at all, at first. In order to do a
remote mount, the automount entries for home have to be commented out,
and then the remote home and its mountpoint have to be put into the
/etc/vfstab. A reboot will likely be needed thereafter.

Some of this goes all the way back. Sun used to have two architectures (Sun3 and Sun4/SPARC) and some workstations were diskless. Everything came from the servers (including booting over the network) and there were two complete hierarchies of /bin and everything else in a release. Typically, you kept the expensive Sun3 servers and added Sun4 workstations as needed. The /export started out as the place where the diskless nodes did their network mounts. So a user could have distinct user home directories on the server for each workstation, just as if it was local to the workstations.

Yes there is a difference. Two separate filesystems but with auto-mapping /etc/auto_home they can be made the same. This is a very useful feature when you need the same home mounted via nfs server on different servers. For example, an engineering environment, desk vs lab workstations.

More than 20 years ago on SunOS 4.x the filesystem for users home directories was mounted on /home. With the automounter configured by a NIS map, this made problems, as you can't NFS mount /home on the home server again using the same path.

It was a bit tricky what the Sun guys did than. SunOS remounted the filesystem on a different path, exported it and remounted /home by use of the automounter. Since SunOS 5.x usually the central home filesystem is mounted on /export/home and remount it using the automounter on /home to have identical view of the filesystem network wide.

It might be a bit faster to use /export/home on the server, but it's also a bit confusing. I use /home/dpt/username throughout the whole UNIX world.